Aug. 28, 2005 - 11:04 am
i remember first hearing about this movie a few years ago when it was released and a saw a clip of an action scene on the Ebert & Roeper show. it looked really awesome, but i think i assumed it would be too much like the matrix to actually enjoy. recently, i decided i could no longer wait to see it and added it to our Netflix queue.
Equilibrium takes place in the future after WWIII, in a society where people have agreed to take a calming drug so that they no longer have any emotions or feelings. in order to enforce this drug-induced state, there is a religious/military group of a few individuals called the Grammaton Cleric. aided by the police, they seek out "sense offenders" and put them to death and destroy their belongings. Christian Bale plays the top-notch cleric who is an unbeatable warrior. when he misses a dose of his medication, he begins to glimpse feelings for the first time and questions the validity of his society's agenda.
i really enjoyed seeing Christian Bale in this movie. i like the idea of him not being an entirely mainstream leading man. i think he's too good of an actor for that. he needs to choose his roles carefully. as long as he doesn't continue to do Batman movies, i think he might one day soon be Oscar material.
this movie is pretty cool in a lot of ways, but the plot is fairly flawed. after Bale has to kill his partner, he gets a new partner played by the fairly crappy actor Taye Diggs. Diggs is constantly making sly jabs at Bale and treating him like he thinks that Bale's actions are idiotic. he smiles at him, laughs at him, etc. these are not the actions of a man who is not feeling any emotions. there are a number of other flaws that i can't quite put my finger on though. i guess they're mainly just bits and pieces that could have been done better, in a different way. some of the scenes were also excessively violent, like the scene where the cleric is stopping a police officer from killing some people and he first breaks his hand, then his arm, and then pretty much tears his leg off. i think the man would have stopped with a broken hand.
yeah, so i guess i don't have a ton of a case for the flawed plot. i know it was there, but i couldn't put my finger on it. i had trouble believing it all and going along with it anyway.
one thing i really enjoyed about the look of this movie was that whenever they would show the cityscape, they showed one that was inspired by the work of Hugh Ferriss, whose work was also showcased in the classic German sci-fi film Metropolis (1927).